Need some of your expert advice again

[PANFACE]

Hi and thanks again to you all that advised me last time on my RAM questions.

Well i went out and bought a Gigabyte DS3P board, An E6400, a gig of 800 speed corsair RAM and a Galaxy 7900GS card.

Next step is to overclock and like a lot of people i find it a little daunting!
I don't want to go mad for now just clock it up to 2.7 or 2.8 gig.

I've been reading up on this and that but to be honest a lot of it is still as clear as mud.
Can most of the overclocking be done via the gigabyte easy tunes windows inerface or am i better off going into the bios and doing it?
What should i be looking for first, any major pit falls i should know about etc?
:?
Advice please.

Thanks again,
Panface.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

1) disable speedstep in the bios
2) disable spread spectrum
3) make sure ram are set to 1:1
4) set fsb to 350 (that'll be 2.8ghz)
reboot and see if it works.
If not hold down insert while booting and it'll reset.
Total fail and you'll have to reset via the jumper.

you won't have to raise the voltage on the processor for that oc, and most likely you won't have to add voltage to the chipset default either, but if it fails, you can try that.

I've only oc'ed a ds4 and I don't recall the software, so I can't answer if that'll do the trick or not - and gigabyte's homepage won't load for me at present.

ps. fsb 350 will actually underclock your ram a bit, so you won't have to change timings or anything on those. Basicly just leave everything else at auto.

 

[PANFACE]

Nice one Neiro.

I'll give that a go. This should all be fine under a stock fan shouldn't it as i ran out of cash and will get something better in the near future.

After i do this what should my mhz reading be saying bang on 2.8 or something else?

 

[neiroatopelcc]

it'll always be a tad off, but don't worry about it. if it sais 2802mhz or whatever won't matter, cause the chipset will handle all ratios so stuff works together.

The only think you should worry about is wether the mcp will handle 350 without more voltage, and since the gigabyte 965 boards have such a good reputation I don't think you'll have to worry about that.

The stock cooler should make do (a test from november or so said approx 3.1ghz was the limit), but it'll be noisy without speedstep activated.

Get a scythe ninja or tt big typhoon once you can afford it. They're rather cheap (compared to a zalman anyway) and do equally well.

 

[PANFACE]

Hi Neiro,
Many thanks. I did what you said roughly and have a reading of
2760 mhz there or there abouts. It goes up and down a tad. FSB 345
cpu voltage 1.31 pci freeq 33.00
memory voltage 1.85

This sound ok?

I will leave my PC all the time downloading so what do you recommend is as far as i can push it?

Thanks for fan ideas also

 

[neiroatopelcc]

I don't know how far you can push it, but be aware that the futher you push it the shorter the life expectancy will be.

If you keep your computer downloading all the time anyway tho, I'd suggest you run dual prime95 (make two shortcuts! one with -a1 and one with -a2 in the command line so you can run two at once).
If you set one to do a small and one to do a blend torture test and you don't get errors, you've got a stable system.
If you are getting stable results (it'll never stop unless you stop it or it finds an error), you can always up the fsb 5-10mhz and at some point you'll be getting an error saying something about faulty hardware.... that's when you've crossed the line and should back down again.


But if you're using the system for downloads, why do you even need to oc it?